We got one in our little town. No doubt you’ve got at least one in yours. Woot:
With GM and Chrysler closing almost 2,000 dealerships between them, and with car dealers generally suffering from the collapse of new-car sales, America’s going to have a huge lot of huge lots sitting empty. And the current commercial real-estate market isn’t exactly crying out for more unwanted property. Sure, we could just sit back and let the crackheads and feral dogs take the places over, but the urban planning site Planetizen has started a discussion about what cities should do with their newly empty car lots. Users can vote on user-submitted options.
I’m reminded of an observation journalist Hedrick Smith made last month in a Fresh Air interview while discussing his Frontline documentary, Poisoned Waters:
Parking lots are devastating for the environment because they gather all kinds of dirt and all kinds of chemicals and particularly…the chemicals that come off cars, oil, grease, hydrocarbons, metals, all kinds of industrial stuff that gets dumped and things that people throw away and so forth. And when it rains, it’s just…sheets of water sliding down into the nearby creeks… So, from the environmental standpoint, it’s murder.
In that same interview Smith — an advocate of smart, concentrated development — points to Arlington, VA, as part of the solution:
Arlington is…growing up, not growing out. They built new apartment and office buildings on top of old used car lots and old parking lots. So, the amount of impervious surfaces, paved surfaces, asphalt or concrete has not increased. So that the water is still hitting the same area. And actually there are more green spaces in the county than they were before, not a lot but a little bit.
Given our economic circumstances, it seems likely those unused lots will remain empty for a while.